Best Editing Software

I facilitate a small informal animation group where we're all pretty much learning as we go along. We have been capturing images using the software that goes with a Canon camera we have use of and have now finished both filming and audio recording and are looking for easy to use software for editing it all together. We have the possibility of funds for this purpose so my question is therefore in two parts, the first being if money is available (without being extortionate), what is the best editing software we could get, bearing in mind that we are hoping that our animation group will be a long running project and that we would be looking for something that will stand the test of time. I had Dragonframe in my head but it appears that that is more for image capture. We would probably be looking at investing in image capture software some time in the future so software that did both would be great if it was available. The second question would be in case we're not lucky with funding, what is the best free editing software for our purpose? We've been using Audacity for capturing audio.

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Premiere Pro or Sony Vegas are two well known video editors for Windows. But not in the cheap or free categories. I use Final Cut Pro 6 which is only for Mac OSX, so I can't speak from experience about either of those.

I generally use Dragonframe to capture, then After Effects or TV Paint to do various effects (like chroma keying, wire removal, adding eye blinks, adding/removing frames, colour grading) and cropping/resizing to HD video 16:9 format. Then I import the 1080p shot into my editing program for assembly and laying sound tracks.

Probably a lot of those things can be done in the editor, but with the ones I've used, they were really designed for standard video sizes and shapes, and couldn't even load the full size 3:2 ratio images captured by my DSLR. I have to crop and resize first, and save as QT mov files, before I can load them into Final Cut.

Audacity is good, I use it for recording and editing my sound files before importing them into the video editor. I'm sure there are some free or low cost video editors, but I don't know what they are. With any luck, someone else will be able to help.

I just googled "Windows free video editor", and found this list of top 10:

While not the best and not easy to use it is FREE and can do all sorts of editing and also special effect work. It is geared more towards the computer animation pipeline but most people forget that the 3D program Blender has a video and sequence editor. It handles several types of files including just images and is able to output a large amount of formats. It is just not a user friendly program but it is FREE. Youtube has plenty of tutorials on using the VSE (Video Sequence Editor)

You need different programs for different purposes. So After Effects is great for fiddling around, rigs, time stretching and all sorts, then Premiere is best at straight editing of clips. I paint n eyelids in Photoshop.

The route I went was to buy a s/h laptop from eBay with Adobe CS6 already on it.

1.Capture in any SW you like but DF seems to be the choice of many animators here.

2. Scale your SW in Blender or Fusion 8. Blender is entirely Open Source while Fusion is Closed Source but free( as long as you do not want the network rendering facilities and motion components). I prefer Blender for scaling since it is easier to setup and readily accepts image sequences.

3. Do your VFX and Compositing in either Blender or Fusion 8. Fusion 8 has more tools for compositing and it allows any model created in Blender to be imported and textured. Personally itry to stick to Blender for all my compositing stuff but the color grading and a few of more complicated effects are done in Fusion. Bot Fusion 8 and Blender accept image sequences. Blender can do CPU& GPU rendering but i recomend, if you do not like surprises, to use a single rendering mode, either CPU or GPU. There are differences because of memory sizes and used algorithms.

4. Do video editing in Lightworks. It is a professional package, recognized by the industry and it is free. The limitation is in the types of videos you can output and the max resolution you can use. The free version can easily output Youtube and Vimeo at 720/1080 and the paid version can output in up to 4K. Lightworks also accepts image sequences as videos and can work with them flawlessly. Lightworks also accepts multitrack audio editing, however the audio editor does not have many effects. Since Lightworks is a video editor, the professionals assume you do your audio in other packages.

5. Do audio editing in Ardour. It is by far the most versatile Open Source DAW one can find. Imports and exports a lot of formats, can do a lot in terms of effects and channels, can work seamlessly with wav,ogg or midi,etc. Downside of it is that it runs only on Linux and it requires some time for you to get used to the interface, functionality, automation and setup.

For 3d Environments and set extensions i use Blender as a base for modeling and sometimes compositing. I also use Substance Painter for texturing but you can safely use the texture tools available in Blender. Sometimes i find those textures easier to use, especially when you work on large objects like buildings. Substance Painter has issues scaling to large objects and in general is not used for that. You create a tile-able texture in SP and then you use it in Blender or Fusion.

All of the above are trialled and work perfectly together, both on Windows(excepting Ardour) and Linux. On Linux however, Lightworks cannot use Boris FX and such since these are exclusively for Windows. In my setup, i run all of the above in a Centos 7 system and also a Fedora 25.

Based on what you described, I strongly recommend you buy Dragonframe first. Maybe get the remote control too.

After that, you can try editing your videos for free with Filmora or VSDC Video Editor.

In the future, maybe get the 50$ edition of Sony Vegas?

Or you could try getting the Adobe CC subscription thing. If you chose just one software you can have a Premiere license for 20$ a month. Or for 50$ a month you can have the whole package, including After Effects, Photoshop, and the audio editors.

I've so far been persevering with Windows Movie Maker as it is quite simple to use, although I'm finding my attempts at lip syncing from the existing footage kind of hard, which isn't helped by the zoom only going so far when looking at the timeline, and the visibility of the sound wave to match up with the character's mouth isn't great, so I'm publishing to check on progress rather than play back the glitchy preview. I'm also aware that I'm looking to add other sounds like sound effects and music and I'm aware that this isn't the best program for more than one track. Because of these difficulties I'm considering Sony Vegas. The Sony Vegas Movie Studio HD Platinum Production Suite 11 has the best reviews on Amazon's UK site, although I'm aware that there are newer versions. It also is very reasonably priced at £37.99. Does anyone know whether I can set the frame rate using this software and also whether you'd endorse this purchase or a later edition (or an alternative)?

Thanks again for all your advice. It's been printed out and had the highlighter treatment for future reference!

Hey guys, I'm a total newbie, and i'm not up on all the editing software thats out there but here's where i need some help. I'm going to buy SMP instead of Dragonframe because i've heard that Dragonframe does not have a rig removal app. and SMP does. And as far as video editing it seems that the ones that iv'e read about require a monthly fee. Does anyone know of a editing program that i could use with Dragonframe but just buy outright without a monthly fee [and obviously have a rig removal app.] There's so many video software's out there and totally confused of which would be good for what we do. Any help i would very much appreciate. Thanks. Mike H.

Many long months have passed. I hope that this is read as I appreciate that it's stuck at the end of an old thread that appears to have dried up with regards to previous posts.

The long and the short of it is for various reasons I finally plumped for Adobe Premiere Elements to edit the film (I also have access to Adobe Photoshop). The software that the organisation I'm volunteering with have finally installed for me is Elements 15, which I looked at for the first time this week. To tell you the truth I've been a bit overwhelmed by it and I've been faced with the thought that I've possibly made the wrong call re: editing software. This thought hasn't been helped by something I read online which states that Adobe have removed stop motion from this version of the software.

To put it simply I have basic needs. All I want to do is to use a big ol' time line where I can input each frame. As I've previously discussed my problem relates to reasonably successfully mastering lip-syncing. I was hoping that having both the image and the sound wave running alongside each other would help with this (any other suggestions or fixes gratefully received). I'm hoping that this software can easily fulfil this, but I am having teething problems where every little thing I want to do has me resorting to Google to try and figure it out.

My plan is that once I've successfully laid out both the picture and the dialogue I'll then add in everything else.

From the perspective of experienced film makers like yourselves, can Adobe Premiere Elements 15 meet my needs once I've mastered the basics?

Does anyone have any hints or tips on approach which might better aid this task?

I spent a long time trying to understand how different programs worked, and was also constantly going to video tutorials, so you are not alone. Persevere, because it does all suddenly become easier.

One of the things it took me a while to get to grips with is that you can only do certain things with each program, and it all gets horrible if you are forcing it to do something it wasn't designed for. So Dragonframe is a framegrabber, placing individual frames in a sequence. Then you need something that converts the image sequence into a film clip. I use after effects for this, but others use TV paint and there are some free ones also.

Then you import the clips into Premiere, where you can edit them. It looks like Elements has just been given a nice user interface to make editing more fun, but it has a timeline into which you drop clips.

So I think your issue is that you are missing out one step in the process. Elements probably won't process image sequences.

I am not an expert, but there are people in the forum who might be able to give you more info. That's just my two ha'porth.

The best free editing software is Blackmagic Davinci Resolve (https://www.blackmagicdesign.com/ca/products/davinciresolve/). I very highly recommend it. Having used Final Cut and Premiere, Resolve is my editor of choice at the moment. It does editing very well, colour correction even better, and has just improved its sound mixing workspace.

For free effects and compositing software, I'd also recommend Blackmagic Fusion. I was an AfterEffects user for many years, but I've learned Fusion through online tutorials over the past few months, and it's legitimately a better compositing solution (partly because it's node-based, which took some time to get used to, but now I can't go back). I'll use it on future projects for sure.

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